Keep Your Pet Heartworm Free!
What is Heartworm?
Heartworm is a parasite that infects cats and dogs. While there are some subtle differences between feline and canine heartworm disease, the parasite remains the same.
Why do they call a heartworm a heartworm?
One might argue with me why is a man called a man, then why should not the heart worm be called a heartworm? While I am reasonably unsure about the rationale behind why a man is called a man, a simpler explanation could be provided for the latter! In the lifecycle of an adult heartworm, they tend to spend more of their time in the right ventricle of an animal’s heart. This should be reason enough for the worm to be named a heartworm!
Diagnosis of heartworms in pets
Clinical symptoms in dogs and cats include increased exhaustion, coughing and in advanced stages fainting, coughing with blood and reduced physical activity!
How do I save my pet from heartworms?
‘Prevention is better than cure’ is one adage that seems to have caught with shrinks and vets alike! But in the case of heartworms, they say it is better to check with your vet to see whether your pet is already infected, before deciding to go for heartworm preventives.
The reason behind the necessity to check for a heartworm infection in your pet, before you administer any preventive medication, is because of the fact that most heartworm preventives can kill the worms in the larval stage only.
The first sign of an animal likely to get infected by the heartworm is the presence of large amounts of these parasites in the animal’s blood as larvae. The preventive meds kill the larvae but cannot take care of bigger adult parasites. In case an animal is infected with the disease already, their bloodstream would have the adult parasites. These parasites when killed would exude toxic chemicals that are harmful for the animals. So a preventive might not always prevent your animals from worse health!
Believing that I have made the point of the need to check for heartworm infection, before any preventive is administered, we can go deeper into probing about heartworm disease.
Mosquitoes Are Not A Friend!
The best possible way to protect your animals from heartworms is to keep them away from mosquitoes, which are the primary carriers of the parasite. While people in Northern France might not worry about this issue, most of us have to!
The heartworm preventive medicines as explained above can kill larval parasites only. This makes it necessary to administer the meds once a month to prevent new larvae from developing into adults.
The animals must absorb the dead worms left by the heartworms safely. This might require special medication from the vet!
Cats Versus Dogs
Feline heartworm diseases are tougher to treat! This is because, the inflamed hearts of the cats due to the presence of worms could be further inflamed, when the dead worms decompose. Treating cats could thus be a bit trickier than treating dogs for heartworms. Some cats are rather choosy in nature, when it comes to heartworm meds. That makes it even more difficult to treat the cats for heartworms.
It is wise to ask the vet to choose the medication for your cat than to go to a pet med shop and get medicines for your cat’s heartworm disease, as wrong medications could get your pet into deeper trouble than no medication!
Having said all the things about cat and dog heartworm disease, one must also be aware of the fact that, in certain rare cases, humans might get heartworm diseases from their pets! This gives even more reason for protecting your pets from heartworms.